Once upon a time on usenet David Hare-Scott wrote:
I have been using usenet for decades now and regularly on these two
NGs for about 12 years as far as I recall. I have learned much and I
hope sometimes taught something useful. At times it has been real
fun and I felt a comradeship with people who I will never meet in the
flesh. There has always been some noise, a background of posts that
were a waste of time and some posters who were always or nearly
always a waste of time. On the whole it was worthwhile.

But usenet is dying. The number of posters reduces every year. It
seems there are too few good ones left to maintain critical mass. There
has always been the ignorant the foolish and the arrogant but
now the proportion has grown in the population and so the signal to
noise ratio has declined. For those who say you can always plonk the
idiots and the terminally toxic, the problem is by the time you do
that there isn't much left. I have been reading and posting less and
less.
Aside from the general decline in numbers the core problem is those
who want to abuse the system for fun or profit. Spammers and the
selfish are with us in every medium and you need to cope with that
somehow. In this respect interfaces where users must be identified
and can be banned by administrators for either reason have an
advantage but clearly this winnowing is never completely effective.
Nonetheless most NGs survived a long time without resorting to
moderation - but no more. Smaller groups (eg aus.gardens) have
shrunk to the point where they are pretty much useless and the energy
isn't there to amalgamate or reorganise to groups with sufficient
mass to continue. The medium has had its day, Sadly.
The sad, the sick, the crazy and the selfish are sometimes amusing
but often just annoying and time wasting. Their common characteristic is
they have no appreciation of their own behaviour. In real life there are
consequences to bad behaviour in society,
nobody will talk to you if you go far enough. The medium to some
extent enables the socially ill by providing real-life anonymity,
allowing nymshifting and seeming like people are not actually real,
they are just streams of electrons out in the ether.
If you are sick enough to spend all your efforts getting attention by
being a turd then usenet will make it possible. If (however well
meaning you may be) you feel it your bounden duty to jam your
politics, religion or wackiness down the throats of an international
audience then you can do it here. If you are 15 years old (in years
or attitude) you can perversely get an ego massage wasting the time
of good people who just want to talk about plants. It no longer seems
possible to agree to disagree, you must have the last word and go
over the same ground again and again. The dead horse is no longer
getting beaten but a hole in the ground where the dust of the horse
used to be must be assailed daily. The extremists of the left and
right of US politics are both blind the fact that around the world
NOBODY ****ING CARES about your sectarian poison. You are both safe
and warm in your respective blankets ( red and blue to be sure) of
national, social and moral insularity - a plaque on both your houses.
I have just got a new machine that doesn't natively come with a news
client so I am faced with buying and setting one up on it, or not. My
decision is to not. I will probably stop reading here within a
month when my old PC gets retired.

Most will not care which is fine. To those who have shared their
knowledge, experience and goodwill, thanks and fare thee well. May
your seed always germinate, your tomatoes be tasty and your flowers
waft their perfume over your life.

David that is such a damn eloquent post about not just what is wrong with
usenet but society - in fact society moreso. Thunderbird is a free email /
newsgroups client and Eternal September a free NNTP server so I for one hope
that you'll reconsider. I'm seeing this first in aus-gardens as I've been so
busy in my own (NZ) garden I haven't had time to check the groups for a
while and aus.gardens is alphabetically superior to the two rec. groups
(both of whch I read) and is in the same hemisphere as me. Also I see a lot
of posts for the first time in ages....

I have copied your post to my saved folder where it joins several similar
posts from over the years from other decent rational people. Good people who
are worth 'reading' and the loss of whom is a blow to this medium. Some of
those people reconsidered and I hope that you do too (I see a bunch of posts
in this thread hopefully entreating you to stay).

If you don't go then you give in to the arseholes - and leave me (and I'm
sure many others) with less of a reason to check these groups. I've been
trying hard not to give in to the exodus to advertising sponsored on-line
forums where petty dictators get to control who can and can't say what they
want to say.

Your presence if you do decide to go will be sorely missed me me at least.
I'm more of a reader than a poster and your posts are always worth the time
taken to read them. Whatever you decide I wish you all the best - may your
life be filled with love and laughter.

Sincerely,
Shaun.